It’s still too early for a Toronto Blue Jays teardown, but the question looms uncomfortably larger each day

Scott Stinson04.20.2017

Toronto Blue Jays' Jose Bautista strikes out and is tagged by Boston Red Sox catcher Sandy Leon in the eighth inning of their American Leguae baseball game at the Rogers Centre on Thursday, April 20, 2017.

On an afternoon when many of the 44,000 in attendance at the Rogers Centre were school kids, the Blue Jays dropped a 4-1 decision in 10 innings to the Boston Red Sox, leaving the home side with just three wins in their first 15 games.

It was a microcosm of Toronto’s abysmal start: a fine starting pitching performance, in this case six shutout innings from Marco Estrada, but almost nothing from the bats. Or Joey Bats.

Boston’s Chris Sale struck out 13 Jays over eight innings, including Jose Bautista four times. Just when it looked like the Blue Jays might end a dismal home stand on a positive note, with Kendrys Morales tying the game on a ninth-inning homer, Jason Grilli gave up a three-run double to Mookie Betts in the 10th to put an end to that. With Toronto’s once-fearsome offence having scored three runs or less 10 times already, it was too much to overcome.

The Blue Jays now head to California in desperate need of not just a win, but a win streak. And they have minor-league call-ups lined up to start in Los Angeles because of injuries to Aaron Sanchez and J.A. Happ.

In sum: this could have gone better.

So, now what?

The horrors of April have pushed out into the open the question that has hovered over the Blue Jays since the arrival of president Mark Shapiro in the fall of 2015: would they try to keep a creaky roster largely intact, or trade veterans to restock the system with young talent?

So far, Shapiro and general manager Ross Atkins have managed to avoid the latter. They made modest bets on starting pitching (Estrada, Happ) leading into the 2016 season, and this past winter added the similarly modest deals of Morales and Steve Pearce before getting Bautista to accept far less money than he ever expected would lure him back to Toronto. Neither off-season was bold or aggressive in terms of committing the Jays to major long-term dollars, but nor did they begin anything approaching a teardown. They just kept the options open.

As someone who has speculated before about management’s path to a rebuild, the unexpectedly bad start to this season does provide the opportunity to begin the kind of roster turnover that they might have been reluctant to undertake. There’s good reason for that reluctance, since the return to the playoff baseball turned the Jays into a huge revenue generator for the team’s corporate owners.

But even though my jaded-cynic credentials are up to date, it’s still hard to imagine management blowing things up given what they have said in the very recent past.

Last October, after the American League Championship Series loss to Cleveland, Atkins met with a group of reporters in a conference room behind the Toronto clubhouse and gave his impressions of the Blue Jays’ roster at that point in time.

“There’s a culture in that clubhouse there of people expecting to win,” Atkins said. The GM talked about taking a step forward in 2016 and said he felt “really good about our opportunity to get a little bit closer next year to a championship, and we’ll continue to work toward that.”

This is, to be sure, not a shocking thing for the general manager of a playoff team to say. It’s not like anyone expected him to say he thought the team needed to be torn apart and overhauled.

But, asked specifically about the possibility of retrenching — the new euphemism for suffering for a year or two at the major-league level while bringing in prospects — Atkins did not equivocate.

“What I can tell you is we’re trying to win,” he said. “We’re going to continue trying to win. I can’t see a scenario (where) that changes, really.”

And so, here we are. Taking Atkins at his word, those scenarios where he couldn’t envision a change from trying to win would include a cold first month of the season. Even a very cold first month.

Still, if the losing continues, then so will the questions about blowing it up, whether that would include moving someone who would be an attractive rental player like Estrada or the full-on nuclear option of dealing Josh Donaldson.

Toronto management might not enjoy having those questions asked — U.S. baseball media types have already started the Donaldson trade musings — but this was always going to be a possibility given the cautious approach this group has taken to following the hair-on-fire final months of the former general manager in 2015. When other teams in your division are spending US$200-million on a starting pitcher one winter (Red Sox, David Price) and then trading their best prospect for another starting ace the following off-season (Red Sox again, Chris Sale), your fans can be forgiven for doubting if you are quite as interested in winning in the short term.

Back in October, when Atkins wasn’t staring up from the bottom of the standings, he sounded sure that the Blue Jays, these Blue Jays, could still make noise. He considered the team they had — players and management — and said it was “an incredible opportunity to compete against the rest of baseball.”

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It’s still too early for a Toronto Blue Jays teardown, but the question looms uncomfortably larger each day

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